Thursday, January 7, 2010

'Fraidy cat China

GuamDiary had thought of calling this 'the paper tiger that is China', but didn't. We thought the image of a cat afraid of its own shadow, worked better.China has to might to crush, to main, to kill its own and the subject races that are Tibetans and Turkogmen or Qyghurs in Xinjiang, we full well know. It has deep pockets to corrupt at home and abroad. It is driven to defeat its enemy the US, by one fashion or another. It is confident, for the future, it believes, is theirs. And yet a single human in saffron robes the Dalai Lama or a woman who lives and breathes the hopes of the Qyghurs Rabiya Kabeer, can make Beijing shakes in its boots, especially at international film festivals.The Chinese thump a steel fist on the table in demanding a film say 'the sun behind the clouds: Tibet's struggle for freedom' be removed from the Palm Springs International Film Festival in California, or in 2008, at the Sydney film festival, it threw thunderbolts and boomed out in threatening tones, were the organisers to show a documentary of Rabiya Kabeer.Beijing drew a line in the sand like a petulant child in a sandbox who is not getting his way. If you don't play by our rules, we're going to pick up our marbles and go away. And so there with its fat tongue stuck out.The organisers in Sydney and now in Palm Springs were not impressed, nor moved by China's threat to pull the rug under its own films. So, 'Nanjing, Najing', a film about the Japanese occupation and bloodletting in 1937 won't be shown at the California film festival.The organisers proved of sterner mettle than US president Barack Obama who broke White House tradition by receiving the Dalai Lama, in order not to ruffle Chinese feathers.For all its power, and GuamDiary in no way scants China's penchant for violence and easy resort to brass knuckles, to have its way, when it comes to the Dalai Lama and Rabiya Kabeer, the chink in China's armour is very evident.Like a country mouse, it scurries for the comfort of a hole. Like all bullies, it takes French leave on a level playing field when it has to match its own propaganda with the glaring truth of daylight which is its brutal repressive rule of Tibet and Xinjiang. If the Dalai Lama and Rabiya Kabeer gives the Chinese authorities diarrhea, a good b out of loose bowels, imagine what a united resistance movement of its own dissident or critics can do!